Week 16 Prompt- Reading: past, present, and future

Belleville Public Library

Belleville, IL. 

Pictured above is the library where it all began. At least once a week, I would go here with either my mom or my grandmother. The basement was the children's room, so some of my earliest memories are of that floor. As I got older, I was allowed to browse on the first floor for titles for older kids (I still remember the display of R.L. Stine books),  The second floor has this huge marble staircase leading up to the mysterious "research rooms".  

It's an interesting thought experiment to reflect on how my kids' library experiences differ from my own. I'm comforted to realize that, for the most part, their experiences aren't very different from mine. Even with all of the new ways of accessing information, libraries are still these super-chill, zen places of quiet exploration There are obvious things that have changed about how people read today vs. 30 years ago. I would say the primary difference in how I read is that now I listen to most of my books. I think the thing that has changed the most is how I find what to read. It seems to me that for the longest time, the way I found out what to read was by talking about books with my friends, who were also reading all the time. We would take trips to weird bookstores in the city and get piles of Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, and Virginia Woolf paperbacks. There was no such thing as Goodreads, or even really full-time access to the internet. I miss that sense of adventure, but I'm also middle-aged with 2 kids and a full-time job, so jaunting off to bookstores in dicey neighborhoods isn't exactly on my agenda these days. Which is ok! Because, luckily there is Goodreads now. And that really cool Book Graph on the Barnes&Noble website. However, the one thing that hasn't changed, thank goodness, is having a lot of cool friends who also like to read, and who talk about what they read.

So where do I think we will be 20 years from now as readers? How will we read, and how will we find what to read? I'm not certain, but I can tell you what I hope doesn't happen. I hope we don't get some sort of weird technology that, like facial recognition, can tell us what kind of books to recommend through a retinal scan. That would take all the fun out of it (although, yes, I see the irony here. This is pretty much what linked data does, minus the retinal scan). Do you know what else would be weird? People being able to bypass a publisher and just do it their own dang selves. (*crickets chirping*)

Seriously, though.  I could not have even fathomed the leaps that have been made in my lifetime as far as to how we publish and consume written material, and sometimes I get understandably concerned that "reading as we know it" will wither and dies somehow.  But-and you can call me overly-optimistic on this one-I really believe that people are going to continue reading, in any way they can, well into the future, even if books don't look like books anymore.  People aren't just going to stop reading, or lose interest.  My program is certainly proof of that.  My patrons are all blind, and nothing will stop them from reading.  Are there waaayyyyy more things to distract us from reading now?  Absolutely.  Is that what that scares me more than the "e-reader" debate.  Yes.  But, I don't know.  True readers always seem to rise above it somehow.  I think the important thing for libraries and librarians to promote is how to literature keep alive, and to keep patrons coming back for more, in whatever form they choose.  We can do this by staying open to all the changes we see taking place, finding ever new ways to integrate the technology that already exists in the lives of the patron, and make it part of the reading and information experience.